


this is the way the world ends

by deckards



Category: Doctor Strange (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-13 23:22:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7142366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deckards/pseuds/deckards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>nothing is impossible, but everything has a price</i> --- this is the cost of sleeping with ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this is the way the world ends

**Author's Note:**

> okay, so. here’s the thing, right. i was having a chat the other week about how weird it is that over the last ten or twenty years stephen strange has gone from, like, totally ignorant of (or consciously ignoring) advances other people make on him to whatever it is that’s going on in the current 2015 run. thus do i present you with this fic wherein i attempt to reconcile these changes. or something. whatever i guess so anyway.

 

 

> there exists, for everyone, a sentence _—_ a series of words _—_ that has the power to destroy you. another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. if you’re lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.
> 
> \---- philip k dick

 

Things like this, they happen slowly.

Some mornings you wake up tangled in purple sheets with a stranger stretched out next to you. You can feel their sweat stuck to your skin and taste them in your mouth and you choke back the urge to wretch.

To everyone else, this is a choice you have made, and happily. They laugh and tell harmless jokes at your expense and you don’t correct them because it’s easier to be called a dog than to admit the truth. If you say it out loud it becomes real and if it’s real maybe anymore there’s no path left that you can find to come staggering, hobbling, crawling back to who you are. Who you were.

There is a word for this, but you can’t remember what it is. The sound of it tickles the back of your throat and your tongue traces consonants across the top of your mouth.

The word for that is _palat_.

Days pass and you wonder if the person you remember ever really existed after all, or if that was some version of yourself you made up. You sit down at your desk and you run your fingers across the grain, feeling for small chips in the varnish. You find a scrap of paper and a ballpoint pen and you watch your hands shake as you write down the names of all the demons you’ve absorbed or been possessed by. The list is long and illegible and probably incomplete. There are so many years to account for.

Your writing is worse now than when you were practicing medicine. Then, you were proud of the scratching scrawl of your words over a patient’s chart. Now, all you can see is damage.

On the farm where you grew up, your mother used to preach Catholic values at the dinner table while the rest of the family nodded and listened and if anyone else really believed in her god, they never told you about it.

The winter you were twelve your mother developed an interest in Medieval writing. It snowed on the farm and the fields were buried, the landscape transformed into a flat white world blending into a dull grey horizon. Donna, your sister, ran outside in something bright and pink, shrieking in delight, day after day. Sometimes you joined her and your faces turned red and burned from the cold.

Sometimes you stayed inside and your mother would talk about Margery Kempe or Pope Gregory while she peeled potatoes and you stood at the sink washing russet after russet, your hands freezing in the icy water.

“Pride is the root of all evil,” she told you and you rubbed your palms together, trying to get circulation back. “Pride is the root of all sin,” she said and you flexed your fingers, anxious for them to bend properly again.

At the dinner table you said, “I don’t see what’s so bad about pride. If you’re good at something, shouldn’t you be proud of it?”

It was an innocent question, and your mother smiled indulgently at you while your father’s face pinched itself into a frown around his mouthful of pees.

“Can I go see _Cat People_?” Donna, all of ten years old, asked. “It’s that new movie just came out last month, and my friend, Laurel, she said her older brother Benji was gonna take her and _—_ ”

Your father growled something ominous, and the chatter stopped. Your mother looked down at her plate and your baby brother bobbed happily in his chair.

You built a volcano out of your mashed potatoes and then crushed it under your fork. You said, “Wouldn’t envy be worse than pride?”

The next morning, you found a large tract written in a language that was barely English sitting next to your bed. You tried to read it, but it didn’t make sense and after you ran outside to pelt Donna with a barrage of snowballs, you forgot all about the book you’d shoved into your bedside table drawer.

You didn’t think of it again until your mother was dying. She placed it in your hands and you ignored it, like you ignored so many things.

It’s been years and you have no idea what happened to the book she kept trying to give you. You found a copy in a used bookstore once, when you were wandering around the Village, trying to get used to living in New York again. You held it in your hands for what seemed like ages, until the store’s proprietor, a hunched, gnarled man with knuckles the size of lug nuts said, “You gonna buy that, son?”

You shook your head and left the store in a rush, hurrying down the street and never looking back.

With the smell of stale whiskey in the air and the taste turning sour on your breath, you stare at the laptop screen, eyes blurring over the pixels, black dots on a white field. You should have a computer of your own by now, but you prefer to borrow Wong’s and listen to him chastise you for never returning it.

 _And this a howling army in truth follows_ , the website reads, _because the hapless soul, once captured by the principal vices, is turned to madness by multiple iniquities, it is now laid waste with brutal cruelty_.

When you were practicing medicine you woke up next to strangers all the time, often more than one. Sometimes you recognized them from the hospital, other times not. Most of them you never saw again, or if you did, you didn’t remember it. They were disposable people, names that your mouth vaguely recalled the shape of, body parts to be touched or licked or scratched or fucked.

They were bullet points on an itemized list, recorded and forgotten and thrown away like requisitions for new equipment or another box of gloves. Some people were art for your walls, others accessories to your designer labels. Others still were consumable, a quick hit of an expensive drug, a long sip of a high priced champagne. Disposable people for your disposable life, all material possessions and account balances; lives saved recorded in dollar bills, strangers screwed calculated by the steadily ticking hands of a Rolex watch. Even emotion could be commodified, love quantified and found ultimately worth less than the financial cost to maintain it.

You talk about how you left that life, but in reality, it left you. Was taken _—_ stolen _—_ ripped away. If it hadn’t been, where would you be now?

You look at your bed sitting empty and sloppily made. There are no crisp hospital corners like the ones you grew up with and the purple sheets stick out under the duvet in places they shouldn’t and the pillows sit at odd angles. You hate the sight of it. The purple that was always her colour, the space that’s too big for one man to sleep in alone. It makes your jaw clench closed; you feel the cords jutting out of your neck, the snap of your teeth clacking together.

Things like this, they happen in increments. A gradual drift back into old habits, a slow slide like gravity dragging you down beneath the surface of the ocean. The pull of entropy, inevitable and inexorable, tugging chunks away one at a time and leaving an unfinished jigsaw puzzle strewn across the floor: a still life of your entire being, small fragments with furrowed corners and jagged edges, pieces that have faded over time and others that are missing.

The word for this is _incomplete_.

The world for this is _decay_.

You still read medical journals in private. You hide it from everyone like some secret sin, a transgression again the mystic arts that keeps you pinned to who you were. Wong probably knows, though neither of you ever make mention of it and you tell yourself it’s logical to continue to study a wide range of subjects, that since from time to time the world’s various heroes come to you as a doctor of medicine it’s pertinent to keep informed. You learned to be a surgeon sixty years ago and science changes too much too quickly for you to ignore new developments.

It’s not often you’re asked to operate or suture a cut. You enjoy the feeling in spite of yourself, even if these days you have to use magic to still your hands. Each time you finish you stagger to a bathroom and throw up, like stage fright in reverse. This is the cost of spell casting.

Keeping a part of you anchored in science while you dedicate the rest to something spiritual creates a disjuncture in your mind. A disquiet that’s nestled between two realms, not quite warring but not at ease with one another, like a faultline in your subconscious. You wait for the day one school of thought will subduct the other, picture disaster zones in Japan and map their ruined geography onto your soulscape, monuments you’ve built to study and peace and magic shattered under the force of a tsunami.

So you fill yourself up with everything you can, with knowledge and meditation and broken prayers, with spells and science and other people, desperate to plug this hole. You need a dam to stop the slow, steady slide of inertia, but each balm you grasp slips through your fingers and disappears, leaving you worse than you were before. The breach you’ve created, the jarring dissonance, it’s the silence between your thoughts and actions, an internal disunion you can’t seem to reconcile.

The word for this is _divorce_.

The magics you’ve used have left their mark, twisting your insides into something alien and you think all the demons you’ve consumed or summoned must have, too. Your eyes are blue, but you’ve been told sometimes they glow red. In the mornings, you study your reflection in the mirror. You check for specs of crimson flashing in your irises, examine the line of your jaw and the sharp angles of your collarbones and the skin stretched across your ribcage. You do this until it becomes a routine, every day expecting to find traces of the horrors you’ve unleashed, shades of the monster you know yourself to be, but the only face you ever see is a human one.

You wonder if it is better this way or worse.

There was a scrub nurse at New York Presbyterian who told ghost stories to the interns. She a had a bland face cracked by smile lines and hair the colour of stainless steel. She watched you work and she watched you strut down the hallways and she watched you leer at young nurses and rich patients. She called you Doctor Faustus. You think she would laugh to learn that anymore you don’t have a soul left to sell: you’ve tried.

In one of her stories, a ghost fell in love with a mortal whose house it was haunting. The story went like this: the ghost had lived in the house for many years, haunting anyone who came there. One day, a beautiful girl moved in and the ghost fell in love, but it didn’t know how to do anything but frighten. So it haunted the girl day and night, trying to get her attention, until one day the girl finally went mad and jumped out of a twelfth story window. The nurse’s stories always ended badly and had the flavour of incomplete parables; morality tales that didn’t quite manage to translate to anything but a vague feeling of malcontent.

The house you live in now is haunted by all kinds of oddities and specters, though the ghosts are yours alone.

Things like this, they happen slowly.

Some mornings you wake up tangled in purple sheets with your arm thrown out across empty space and your hand curled around the memory of soft white hair and you think the real horror of the scrub nurse’s story wasn’t the haunting, it was the love.

The absence in your bed echoes in your chest and you are hollow inside. You’re an open wound bleeding out all over the mattress.

In Tahitian, the word for this is _tatau_.

Things like this, decay like this, regression like this, it starts sometimes with a single word.

That night the sky was calm and the air crackled with energy. She said, “It is good to see you again, Stephen.”

Sometimes it starts with its absence.

She said, “I want a divorce.”

You should have argued.

For years, you’ve been waiting for that single word, for it’s impact to knock the breath from your lungs, for it’s blade to rend your heart.

You should have fought.

It’s never come. You’ve never said it, and neither has she.

You should have

That word is

You should

 _goodbye_.

 

end


End file.
